[Ranma 1/2] Roses of Shadow

[Brian]

Roses of Shadow is by Richard Lawson.  While he has a webpage here, it doesn't really seem to have anything fanfiction-related on it yet, so you can find the fic in the archives here.

This is one of the fics of yesteryear, and until thisyear, I didn't have time to read it.  Boy, I sure wish I had -- this one feels like a classic all the way through.  This was admittedly my introduction to it, and Lawson explains that this fic is more or less his apology to Kodachi for writing her out of The Inward Love so quickly.

Go figure.

Anyway, the premise of the fic is that Ranma loses his (or, I should say Akane's) match against Kodachi.  After that, Kodachi explains that Ranma's engagement is switched over to her, Genma signed on it for a million yen.  So it's time to move out.

From there, it explores Ranma learning about who Kodachi is, and then, Kodachi learning a little bit about who she is.  And it's about mental illness, and an attempt to deal with it.  The story is well-written, and does one of my favorite things as a divergence.

It doesn't spend pages revisiting the manga with slight differences.  It spends its time covering original territory involving mental illness, a new dynamic for Ranma's relationship to Akane, and Ranma's relationship with his father.  Heck, Ranma's whole perspective is pretty well explored an is fun to read through.  Grammatically, this work is very clean.  The characters are deep and involved, with the possible exception of Akane, who came across kind of ... oddly to me, but outside of that?  I think this piece was a real classic, and was very enjoyable.

I'd give it 4-4.5 out of 5.